April 1, 2011 -- ZSpace -- The
entire Libyan conflict of the last month -- the civil war in Libya, the
US-led military action against Gaddafi -- is neither about humanitarian
intervention nor about the immediate supply of world oil. It is in fact
one big distraction -- a deliberate distraction -- from the principal
political struggle in the Arab world. There is one thing on which
Gaddafi and Western leaders of all political views are in total accord.
They all want to slow down, channel, co-opt, limit the second Arab
revolt and prevent it from changing the basic political realities of the
Arab world and its role in the geopolitics of the world-system.

To
appreciate this, one has to follow what has been happening in
chronological sequence. Although political rumblings in the various Arab
states and the attempts by various outside forces to support one or
another element within various states have been a constant for a long
time, the suicide of Mohamed Bouazizi on December 17, 2010 launched a very
different process.

March 26, 2011 -- Al Masry Al Youm -- Gehan Shaaban has come a long way since her youthful days as a radical Trotskyist student. In the early 1990s she joined forces
with a small group of far-left political activists in Egypt and founded
an organisation called the Revolutionary Socialists. They were inspired by radical
Palestinian-British politician Tony Cliff, who was born in 1917 to a
Jewish family living in the Holy Land and became a fervent anti-Zionist
after emigrating to the UK.

In those days, said Shaaban, things were
very bad for the left. “There was no movement at all”, she said. “In
the 1990s it was a time when you could not say the word “socialism”
because it was the era of the new liberalism and the end of the USSR.”

But now things are beginning to change.
With the fall of former president Hosni Mubarak a new political left is
emerging in Egypt.

March 28, 2011 -- Socialist Unity -- The Arab revolution has widened the left’s horizons. In the region
itself there is now a historic possibility of a new radical politics:
successful resistance to the hegemonic Western powers and to Israel
fused with the movement of the young and propertyless masses against the
corrupt and complicit elites.

The fall of Tunisia's Ben Ali and Egypt's Mubarak shattered decades of Western policy,
rocking them onto the back foot. They are now moving onto the front
foot, as the regional despots raid their political and military arsenals
to cling on.

March 24, 2011 -- People's World -- On March 15, the Communist Party of Egypt announced that after many years underground because of repression, it will be assuming open, public political activities once more. The announcement came after "an extensive meeting with all of its bodies" and was unanimous.

The original Communist Party of Egypt, the Hizb al Shuvuci al-Misri, had been founded in 1922 when Egypt was still a monarchy and very much
under the thumb of British imperialism. The last king of Egypt, Farouk,
was overthrown by an uprising of young army officers in 1952. Out of
that revolution came the 14-year regime of Colonel Gamel Abdel Nasser, a
radical nationalist who worked to break Egypt away from subservience to
Western capitalist powers. In 1965, the Communist Party of Egypt merged
into Nasser's own movement, the Arab Socialist Union.

March 9, 2011 -- Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal -- International left organisations continue to express their solidarity with the Libyan people as they struggle to throw off the Western-backed dictatorship of Muammar Gaddafi. At the same time, they are rejecting moves by Western imperialism for military intervention to hypocritically take adavantage of the situation and try to reestablish a bridgehead in the oil-rich region. Below are statements by the Labour Party Pakistan, the US-based Kasama Project, the Congress of South African Trade Unions and the South African Municipal Workers Union. See also the statements by the Socialist Party of Malaysia and the Socialist Alliance in Australia. More will be posted as they come to hand.

Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez is a hero in the Arab world. Lebanese and Palestinian students carry a picture of Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez as they protest Israel's military offensive in the Gaza Strip, in the southern port city of Sidon, Lebanon, January 12, 2009.

"The Arab revolt represents both an 'economic revolt' and a 'democratic, nationalist and anti-colonial revolution', Santiago Alba
Rico and Alma Allende said, that 'provides the socialist left and pan-Arabists in the region with an
unexpected opportunity'. They said: 'the Arab people, who have returned
to the world stage, need the support of their Latin American brothers'."

February 23, 2011 -- British-born South Asian punk-dance band Asian Dub Foundation (ADF) released their latest
album A History of Now just as the revolution in Egypt was starting to
build. Someone unknown to the band edited news footage of the revolt to
the album’s title track and stuck it on YouTube (above).

The
video, which set ADF’s brittle shards of guitar and searing eastern
strings to images of hurled tear gas canisters and bloodied
revolutionaries, built a following to rival the crowds in Cairo’s Tahrir
Square.Green Left Weekly's Mat Ward spoke to guitarist and
band leader Steve Chandra Sevale -- who is better known as Chandrasonic
for his habit of detuning all his guitar strings to one note and playing
the instrument with a knife. Here is the interview in full.

46 arrested activists charged with treason, tortured

February 25, 2011 -- It has now been confirmed that detained labour movement activist and leading member of the International Socialist Organization Zimbabwe Munyaradzi Gwisai (pictured) and 45 other activists detained by the Zimbabwe state on February 19 have been charged with treason. If found guilty of treason, the activists risk a sentence of death or life imprisonment. They are being tortured to extract bogus confessions. The arrests followed a raid on a closed meeting that was discussing the implications of the revolutions in the Arab world. Gwisai is director of the Labor Law Centre and former Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) MP.

Since 2008, rising food prices have
resulted in 40 mass riots throughout the globe and the United Nations
reports that 37 countries currently face a food crisis.

By Billy Wharton

February 14, 2011 -- Socialist Webzine -- Hidden
beneath the spectacular street battles that forced the Egyptian
dictator Hosni Mubarak out of office was a trigger that exists in dozens
of countries throughout the world – food. Or, more specifically, the
lack of it. While commentators focus on the corruption of the
dictatorship, or the viral effects of the Tunisian moment or the
something akin to an Arab political awakening, the inability of the
Egyptian regime to ensure a steady flow of food staples should be viewed
as a critical factor driving this seemingly spontaneous movement for
freedom.

February 18, 2011 -- There has been much written in the mainstream and even the alternative media -- much of it superficial -- about the uprising in Egypt, and previously in Tunisia, being a "Facebook revolution" and/or a "Twitter revolution". Rare have been analyses that try explain the deeper dynamics at play beneath the surface, which put the effectiveness of cyberspace organising tools into a political and class context. Exceptions to this are two very useful articles that appeared in the February 12, 2011, edition of the India-based left-wing journal, Economic & Political Weekly, which map the interaction between the build-up to the uprising in Egypt and developments in the labour and working-class movements, and how they influenced the technology-savvy young men and women of Egypt.

The world knows about what is happening in the
Middle East. News spreads at mind-boggling speed. Politicians barely have
enough time to read the dispatches arriving hour after hour. Everyone is aware
of the importance of what is happening over there.

After 18 days of tough struggle, the Egyptian
people achieved an important objective: overthrowing the main United States
ally in the heart of the Arab nations. Mubarak was oppressing and pillaging his
own people, he was an enemy to the Palestinians and an accomplice of Israel,
the sixth nuclear power on the planet, associated with the war-mongering NATO
group.

Below are a number of statements and reports of solidarity actions around the world following the overthrow of the US-backed Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak. They include a statement from organisations attending the New Anti-Capitalist Party congress in France, solidarity from the World Social Forum in Dakar, Senegal, a statement by leaders of the Socialist Party USA and a report on trade union organised protests in South Korea. Check back for more.

* * *

Statement from
left organisations present at the New Anti-Capitalist Party congress

February 12,
2011 -- The overthrow of Ben Ali and Mubarak change the political situation not
only in the Maghreb but on the international scale.

February 14, 2011 -- The Bullet -- The events of the last few weeks are one of those historical moments
where the lessons of many decades can be telescoped into a few brief
moments and seemingly minor occurrences can take on immense
significance. The entry of millions of Egyptians onto the political
stage has graphically illuminated the real processes that underlie the
politics of the Middle East.

It has laid bare the longstanding
complicity of the US and other world powers with the worst possible
regimes, revealed the empty and hypocritical rhetoric of US
President Barack Obama and other leaders, exposed the craven
capitulation of all the Arab regimes, and demonstrated the real
alliances between these regimes, Israel and the USA. These are political
lessons that will long be remembered.

February 14, 2011 –
Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal -- Around the world, people
are enthusiastically greeting the “Egyptian Revolution” — the astonishing
victory won by the historic 18-day people’s power uprising. As events move more
rapidly than anyone can anticipate, not only has Hosni Mubarak been deposed,
his corrupt parliament has been dismissed and new elections are promised within
six months. People’s ecstasy in the aftermath of these great victories belies
the fact that Mubarak’s authoritarian system remains intact — nay, strengthened
— by the ascension of Omar Suleiman and the military to supreme power in Cairo.
While the world hails the Egyptian “revolution”, a more sober assessment of
recent events would question the accuracy of that label, at least for now.

Below is the editorial of the Sudanese Communist Party's newspaper Al Midan on the victory of the people's revolution in Egypt. This is a "rough
translation" by Abohoraira Ali, from the original article in Arabic at http://www.midan.net/almidan/?p=21194.

Solidarity
with the people's revolution in Egypt

Al Midan, newspaper of the Sudanese Communist Party

February 13, 2011 -- Congratulations to the Egyptian people for their wonderful
result in standing strong against the dictator Mubarak. We put our fists in the air in
solidarity with the brave freedom fighters. They taught a big lesson to the
security forces and police in the battles fought courageously by the people in Tahrir Square. Through the blood of martyrs,
they shook the regime and forced Mubarak to step down.

What
is happening today is the largest popular revolution in the history of
our country and of the entire Arab world. The sacrifice of our martyrs
has built our revolution and we have broken through all the barriers
of fear. We will not back down until the criminal "leaders" and their
criminal system is destroyed.

Mubarak’s departure is the first step, not the last step of the revolution

The
handover of power to a dictatorship under Omar Suleiman, Ahmed Shafiq
and other cronies of Mubarak is the continuation of the same system.
Omar Suleiman is a friend of Israel and America, spends most of his
time between Washington and Tel Aviv and is a servant who is faithful
to their interests. Ahmed Shafiq is a close friend of Mubarak and his
colleague in the tyranny, oppression and plunder imposed on the
Egyptian people.

"People are holding
their hands up in victory", reports Kouddous. "This will be a day that
no one will ever forget." We are also joined on the phone from Cairo by
Egyptian activists Mona El Seif and Salma al-Tarzi, blogger Alaa
Abdel-Fattah, feminist Nawal El Saadawi, acclaimed writer Ahdaf Soueif,
and Egyptian Historian Khaled Fahmy, who tells Amy Goodman, "I never
really thought I would see this glorious moment in my lifetime."

February 12, 2011 -- Jadaliyya -- Since February 11, and actually earlier,
middle-class activists have been urging Egyptians to suspend the
protests and return to work, in the name of patriotism, singing some of
the most ridiculous lullabies about "let's build new Egypt". "Let's work
harder than even before", ... In case you didn't know, actually
Egyptians are among the hardest working people around the globe already.